So some people have been sharing an image around with girls playing what appears to be D&D

So some people have been sharing an image around with girls playing what appears to be D&D. It has text above the picture that says:

Are you bored with Bingo?
Sick of Sorry? Peeved by Parcheesi?
Maybe you're ready for the fantastic fun of
Dungeons and Dragons

This is pretty cool, right? Showing that girls and women have always played D&D and other games is damn awesome.

But then things get a bit hairy.

Early D&D Ad, circa 1980. Girls definitely allowed.

Except it's not a D&D ad. This gets pointed out. 

I did end up doing further research & discovering it was from an old Dragon, pseudo-ad heading up article.

Except it's not from Dragon, it's from Dynamite Magazine.

Let me explain.

Back in the 1980s, Dynamite Magazine did an article on Dungeons & Dragons. There appears to be only one way online to get a copy of the article and that is through Scribd.

So, I decided to get a copy of it. True to the other posts I saw, it appears to be from Dynamite. The photographs are credited to Richard Hatchings, who was connected to Scholastic, Inc which published Dynamite Magazine and who has over 20,000 pictures published by Scholastic.

What's more is that the article itself appears to have been written by a woman, Margaret Howard, another name connected to Scholastic, Inc. It talks a bit about the history, the market, how to play, etc. I don't have other articles to compare it against right now, so I don't know if this is par for the course or not.

So yeah, the image is cool but...

One issue I have is I now see other posts that call it a D&D ad, crediting him as the source. That's how stuff often ends up in Wikipedia and how people's contributions can inadvertently be erased from history.

On the plus side, the person who appears to be the originator has tweeted the original source and credited Jared and me with finding it. Special thanks for Jared for apparently opening dialogue by joking about pimping wizards and being a dude. (Jared is not proud that this worked nor does he understand why.)

Folks tracked down source on image, ad-ish editorial in scholastic publication

Still unclear if it's in any way, shape, or form an ad, editorial or otherwise, but I'll take what I can get.